Arrowcatcher
New member
I bought and heavily use an HX100V super zoom, and that positive experience led me to buy an SLT-A35 kit. I have been most intrigued by the auto HDR feature set, including the multi-frame noise reduction where a short fast series of images are "stacked" such as is done in astrophotography. Just for fun, I walked out in the driveway and shot Orion's Belt in the overhead night sky using the 75-300 kit lens. This handheld shot rather severely tests the image stabilization and noise reduction. In the resulting image you can see the three "trademark" Belt stars and as well other background objects not visible to the eye. The background is inky black with no color noise confetti. This is extremely impressive and arguably couldn't be done handheld as a casual "snapshot" with any other camera design. The SLT translucent mirror light loss obviously doesn't objectionably hurt low light performance.
In less extreme situations the HDR feature set often comes in very handy where lighting is not ideal.
I have been using DxO Optics Pro and also Photoshop CS5 to achieve better image dynamic range where needed, and it so wonderful that I can now just press the shutter and have all the time consuming HDR work done for me in a couple of seconds. I celebrate this new hardware technology.
Otherwise, the camera's handling and functionality are as desired and expected, and I mainly wanted to emphasize that the HDR/DRO feature set - unique to the Sony brand? - was my primary interest in this camera.
Problems:
Would love to have an articulated LCD viewfinder but could've spent more money on an A65 for that. The EVF is noisy in low light, but I quickly learned to ignore that.
In less extreme situations the HDR feature set often comes in very handy where lighting is not ideal.
I have been using DxO Optics Pro and also Photoshop CS5 to achieve better image dynamic range where needed, and it so wonderful that I can now just press the shutter and have all the time consuming HDR work done for me in a couple of seconds. I celebrate this new hardware technology.
Otherwise, the camera's handling and functionality are as desired and expected, and I mainly wanted to emphasize that the HDR/DRO feature set - unique to the Sony brand? - was my primary interest in this camera.
Problems:
Would love to have an articulated LCD viewfinder but could've spent more money on an A65 for that. The EVF is noisy in low light, but I quickly learned to ignore that.